With Windows XP support ending on April 8th, 2014, Microsoft is offering free migration tools for those still unfortunate enough to be using Windows XP. Whether by choice, necessity or laziness, those still on XP should consider upgrading. In my experiences, if you have at least 2 GB. of memory, anything that is running Windows XP will support Windows 7, in most cases you will even see some performance improvements. You may experience issues with using legacy (really really old) software/hardware but in typical cases you’ll be just fine.

Recent Microsoft operating systems have changed the way “cached” or “saved” credentials are stored. A cached credential is generated whenever the user selects “remember my password”. Normally, this feature works great, however, sometimes when a network/resource password is changed, Windows will still send the older locally cached/saved credential instead.

Under ideal conditions, Windows will see that the credential is no longer valid and prompt the user for new credentials. On the other hand, under certain conditions (not sure what these are), Windows refuses to acknowledge the “this password is incorrect” server response and it attempts to authenticate repeatedly with the outdated/old credential. Depending on your network’s security settings, this behavior could cause your account to become disabled or locked-out. To remedy this, a user must manually remove or update their cached credentials, the best course of action is to remove the cached credential. Instructions on how to remove cached credentials are below, courtesy of www.petenetlive.com

Logitech SetPoint is a powerful configuration tool for most Logitech Products.

Usually, when dealing with keyboards/mice, one plugs in the device and it starts working, later installing any software that is needed to configure the device.

It looks like there is a known, yet unresolved and poorly documented, bug in SetPoint for devices using the popular Logitech Unifying Receiver. After installing SetPoint you will notice there are no “My Keyboard” or “My Mouse” tabs in the setpoint configuration screen.Read the rest of this entry »

Upgrade keys/media sometimes make it difficult for you to perform clean installs of Windows Operating Systems. Clean Installs are often needed when recovering from hardware failure. There are a dozen workarounds, including the perfectly OK method of calling Microsoft during activation, Microsoft will have you run a remote-support tool which is activated with a special key-code provided over the phone.

After combing the net, it looks like there are several policies that should be configured in order to properly allow non-administrator users to install printers

1. Computer Configuration (Administrative Templates): “Point and Print Restrictions”—>Set to Disabled (This seems to be the most important one, users kept receiving UAC prompts until I configured this policy)